Reading ‘Beginners’ With College Teaching and Learning Ears

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning by Tom Vanderbilt

Published in January 2021

Beginners is a book about the joy of learning new skills in adulthood. Beginners is also a book about the science of learning. Or the book can be read as a story of a father/daughter relationship and how co-learning can be a strategy for parenting. Take your pick. They all work if they inspire you to read this wonderful book.

I prefer to read Beginners as the book that will inspire its author, Tom Vanderbilt, to write his next book about higher education.

Before we talk about Beginners and why this book matters to higher ed, I want to first talk about one of Vanderbilt’s earlier books, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (2008). Reading Traffic provided the root of my decade-long enthusiasm for self-driving vehicles.

Traffic (and as a dad, Vanderbilt will appreciate this) is also implicated in one of my worst parenting failures. The book scared me to such a degree (driving being more dangerous and complicated than we usually recognize) that I gave both of my daughters the book when they got their learner's permits. One of my daughters was so freaked out by the book -- and me talking about the book -- that she delayed driving for a year. Not a good result. OK … that is my Tom Vanderbilt Traffic story.

In Beginners, Vanderbilt describes his motivations for, and the experience of, learning seven new skills. These skills are chess, singing, surfing, drawing, juggling, jewelry making and ocean swimming. Vanderbilt’s motivations for learning these seven skills range from wanting not to be the parent who only watches their kid practice new sports and skills to a desire to exercise some mental muscles beyond those of a writer.

At one point in your life, you were a beginner at something. You learned some skill for the joy of learning rather than as an asset to increase your value in the competitive labor market. When was the last time you were a beginner at something? As Vanderbilt writes (and he is a highly skilled expert in writing), the status of a beginner is enormously freeing. Expectations are low, and the first part of the learning can come fast.

So why does Beginners matter for higher education?

Beginners matters for higher education because Beginners is about learning. There is a lot of good learning science that Vanderbilt sneaks into his descriptions of picking up juggling and figuring out how to stay on a surfboard. Professors will find many parallels between what works in their teaching and what works in teaching someone to sing or to draw. Beginners might be the most enjoyable educator development book that a center for teaching and learning could build a workshop around.

Why should Vanderbilt’s next book be about higher education? (Although for the record, I think that everyone’s next book should be about higher education.)

Well, in a few years, Tom’s kid will be going to college. And a residential college experience is undoubtedly about many things (growth, maturation, experiences, sports, experimentation, etc., etc.), but at its heart, college is about learning. As the pandemic has made blindingly clear, the work of teaching and learning is the core work of any college or university.

What Vanderbilt learned about learning in Beginners applies equally to college learning as it does to learning to juggle. Different contexts, same principles.

What Tom Vanderbilt may not know is that there is a slow-burning and largely unnoticed learning revolution occurring across higher education. (Well, he would know that if he read Eddie Maloney's and my book, Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education.)

A book by Tom Vanderbilt on higher education -- with a critical analysis of what is not changing fast enough -- would help in the movement to better align college teaching with the science of learning.

For all of us in higher ed, Beginners is a reminder of how far we need to go to give all of our beginner learners the best possible college experience. We can all learn much about teaching and learning from reading the experience of learning how to surf.

Oh yeah -- the title I gave for this review is "Reading ‘Beginners’ With College Teaching and Learning Ears." I say “Ears” because I read the audiobook version, which Vanderbilt narrates. There is little in life (at least my life) that is more pleasurable than hearing an author expertly read his or her own book. From spending 7 hours and 21 minutes with Tom, I feel as if our relationship has progressed so that we are on a first-name basis.

What are you reading?